Guest Post: Community and Civic Engagement in Museum Programs

Stacey Marie Garcia came to the MAH first as a graduate intern in the summer of 2011. Since then, Stacey has become an indispensable member of our staff, leading our community programs and inspiring us to think in new ways about how we can build social capital in our community. I learn a ton from her every day and wanted to share her thinking--and her graduate thesis--with you.

Visitors bond and bridge through participatory experiences at MAH.

Writing my masters thesis for Gothenburg University’s International Museum Studies program while also working four days a week as the Director of Community Programs at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History this spring was certainly a challenge but also an incredible opportunity. 

There were times when coordinating a fire art festival while researching social capital theory made me want to burn my computer. But, overall I felt overwhelmingly fortunate to be in a job, a museum and a community that I loved and furthermore to be afforded the valuable time most of us do not have to devote to further researching, thinking about, reading and discussing the theories that comprise the foundation of my work.

I chose to focus my thesis on Community and Civic Engagement in Museum Programs.  The purpose of my thesis was two-fold:

1. To research and analyze community and civic engagement practices, methods, theories and examples in other museum programs.
2. To apply the results of my analysis to produce a community-driven program design specifically for implementation at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (the MAH). 

You can download and read the full version of my thesis here. For the purpose of this blog post I’ll discuss three key ingredients from my thesis that can activate community engagement in museum programs and how we apply this to programs at the MAH: assessing and responding to community assets and needs, building social capital, and inviting active participation.

Assess and Respond to Community Assets and Needs

If you want to activate community engagement in your programs, you first need to work together with your communities to determine their diverse needs, assets and interests. This can be accomplished through a variety of feedback methods conducted both inside and outside the museum.  Deeper community relationships through focus groups or community advising committees can further help museums connect with issues relevant to their communities while also hold the museum accountable for their responses. 

Two exceptional examples of community committees stand out: one long standing, The Community Advisory Committees of The Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience and one emerging, the Creative Community Council of the Children’s Creativity Museum.  Both emphasize museums reaching out into the community to support, understand and experience what the community is already doing. They stress community engagement should be an asset- over needs-based approach. It’s not solely about how museums can serve communities but rather what are the communities’ resources, knowledge and interests that can inform museum practice? Furthermore, how can museums and communities work together to share strengths in the community?

Museum programs need to then actively respond to their communities through a variety of ongoing discursive, collaborative and inclusive formats that address needs and assets but also invite communities to be active participants in this process. 

At the MAH

Our first program goal is to meet the needs and assets of our community as defined by our community.  We seek to understand this by listening to and developing ongoing dialogues with a range of community members. We attentively respond to requests and purposefully use different modes of feedback to inform program design from our comment board, social media outlets, conversations and observations both inside and outside the museum, creative feedback at events such as our Show and Tell Booth and online visitor surveys specific to our programs.  We continuously and actively respond to requests as well as invite people to be a part of our programs.

We also formed a Creative Community Committee (C3), composed of a diverse range of multigenerational community representatives from social services, the arts, business, education, the city, technology and our board of directors to provide a multitude of perspectives and expertise.  C3 meets bimonthly to help us understand and brainstorm ways the MAH can collaboratively implement and address the needs and assets of the vast array of communities in Santa Cruz County.

Build Social Capital

A crucial theory in community engagement through museum programs is social capital theory, best defined by Robert D. Putnam, who has written extensively about social capital in American society in his book, Bowling Alone. Putnam defines social capital as “connections among individuals-social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.”  Social capital has two main forms; it should gradually and increasingly encompass both distinct forms of bonding and bridging to create healthier, wiser, more connected, economically and socially sustainable communities.

Bonding social capital refers to networks that bring people together with common interests to strengthen relationships in preexisting groups.

Bridging refers to an inclusive and outward looking form of linking different and diverse individuals and groups together to form new relationships.

Museum programs can be designed to further bond similar groups together such as families and friends in family workshops such as the Dallas Museum of Art’s First Tuesdays. Museum programs can also bridge different groups that might not typically interact such as the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum’s Educational Residential Centre, which designed a program specifically to bridge children of two groups engaged in social conflict, Catholics and Protestants.

Co-created programming that represents the complex range of voices in communities, offers platforms for communication, collaboration and shared experiences that can enrich preexisting relationships while also offer a space for new relationships to form and strengthen.  An example of this is The Portland Art Museum’s partnership with the faculty and students in Portland State University’s Art and Social Practice Department for their annual Shine a Light program.  The program is an experimental playground that bridges artists, students, chefs, comedians, hairdressers, bartenders, dancers, wrestlers and even tattoo artists to produce a community-led event.  Collaborative programs with diverse groups bring in a variety of visitors causing new audiences to interact and connect.

At the MAH

Our second community program goal is to build social capital by strengthening community connections with our collaborators and visitors.  This is a continual process of bonding within preexisting groups and bridging between groups and individuals who might not usually interact.  

Our programs bond our collaborators by closely co-creating programs with community organizations which strengthens their individual internal connections and their relationship to the MAH. For example, the MAH’s Poetry and Book Arts Extravaganza event partnered with Book Arts Santa Cruz and Poetry Santa Cruz to collaborate with 61 talented book artists and poets.  Evaluation surveys showed that Book Arts Santa Cruz members felt their bonds were strengthened as they connected with members in a collaborative capacity that increased group dialogue and stimulated a sense of pride, identity and vision around their work as a group at this event.

Cardboard tube orchestra at Radical Craft Night.

MAH programs are also designed to bond and bridge visitors through creative activities that form participatory dialogical spaces where knowledge is enhanced, widened and deepened through meaningful opportunities for visitors to converse, discuss and collaborate with each other. Relationships can grow as families bond over a Family Art Day experience or friends can work together to create their own shoebox guitar at Santa Cruz Music 3^rd Friday or strangers can collaborate by participating in a cardboard tube orchestra. 

Sometimes we purposefully bridge distinct groups as well such as middle-aged women from local knitting groups with young college students interested in street art to yarn bomb our stairwell for Radical Craft Night.  The MAH’s historic Evergreen Cemetery brings together the Homeless Services Center and MAH volunteers or the local rugby team to collaboratively restore the cemetery.  We are constantly looking for new meaningful opportunities to bridge groups and individuals in our programs.   

Design to Invite Active Participation

Participatory design can be one of the most effective vehicles for developing relationships, building social capital and engaging with community members in museum programs.  Implementing participatory activities and constructivist learning theories allow the learner to actively experiment cognitively and physically, individually and socially, and to collectively build meaning and knowledge. Participatory programming highlights alternative narratives, activates communities and reverses the role of the visitors from consumer to producer, which in turn engenders more connected and active communities.

The value of participatory experiences is epitomized in FIGMENT, a free, creative, participatory, non-profit, community art event.  This participatory event led by emerging artists from all backgrounds, engages communities by encouraging a culture of making, doing, creating and collaboration rather than spectatorship. 

The Denver Art Museum has been leading the way with dynamic programs such as Untitled, which offers a variety of non-traditional encounters with art and the museum through participatory, multidisciplinary activities led by Denver’s creative community. 

At the MAH

Our third community program goal is to invite active participation by offering opportunities at events for visitors to have meaningful, hands-on, cultural experiences in which they act as contributors and co-creators, not just consumers.  We scaffold levels of participatory experiences at events that are intergenerational, multidisciplinary and appeal to different types of learners. We give visitors a new skill to claim rather than a product and work intensely with our collaborators to insure active participation in their activities.

All of our events require some level of participation. Sometimes that results in an artist-led cascading collaborative sculpture of 475 visitor-made scrap metal fish.  Other times it’s a collaborative collage animation workshop, a black light art activity with red lentils, dodge ball, recording songs to send to loved ones, writing haikus for strangers or an urban history scavenger hunt on bikes.

Artists from different worlds, brought
together through Street Art Night.

Our events invite our collaborators to work with us to design participatory activities and offer visitors active, collaborative and meaningful experiences that inspire citizens to positively and actively contribute to their communities.  

Final Thoughts

These are certainly not the only components that constitute successful community engagement in museum programs but they are central for MAH programs and for our community.  This summer, at our Street Art Night, when I saw a young graffiti artist learning how to knit from a woman in her sixties and then taught her how to spray paint or at Experience Metal, when a motorcycle repairman learns how to operate a new tool from an art bike welder or when families work together to create their own cardboard neighborhood or when two individuals who met at one of our events team up to collaborate- it allows me to see first hand the gradual impact of our goals on the community and makes me realize all those late nights spent writing my thesis were completely worth it.

Stacey will be responding to your questions and comments on this post. Enjoy her thesis, share your own example, have a meaty conversation.

Open Thread: Is the Gender Imbalance in the Arts a Problem?

Note: This is a post about gender diversity. I feel strongly that there are huge issues with racial and ethnic diversity in museums and arts organizations that deserve a million more posts. I don't know if gender diversity deserves more posts. That's why I wrote this.

Last week, I spoke at three conferences. One was a conference on risk-taking for librarians. One was a conference on pushing our practice in art museums. And one was a local TEDx. The first two had something in common that the last one didn't. Any guesses?

In library- and museum-land, the participants were 80-90% women. At TEDx, the mix was 50/50.

It took me awhile to catch on to the gender divide in museums, arts organizations, and libraries. I was an electrical engineering student (1% women), then worked at NASA (10% women), and then slowly slid from science museums (about 50% women) to history and art museums (60-80%, depending on who you ask). Even the museums I worked in with a fairly equivalent gender balance were completely out-of-whack when you looked at departments. Exhibits, technology, security, and senior management were majority male. Education and programs were female central.

At first, I reveled in working in progressively more female-engaged environments after my engineering background. But running a museum with 100% female full-time staff and 95% female interns has made me struggle with the obvious disparity. When we have new jobs or internships open up, men represent less than 5% of applicants. We have good male representation as volunteers, trustees, and visitors, but we're lousy on staff. We have 0.75 full-time equivalent men between a contract preparator, graphic designer, and visitor services staff member. We can't even rate a whole guy.

Judging from statistics in a few research studies on museum workers (and the obvious visual data at any museum or library conference excepting tech-oriented ones), this imbalance is extreme but not atypical. It gets even worse if you look at the future of the field. AAM has noted that museum studies graduate programs are "80% white and 80% female." It's not quite as bad as my 99% male electrical engineering class, but it's getting there.

This is a problem. Without this most basic kind of diversity on staff, people make myopic decisions that are biased towards certain audience types. Just as a male-dominated tech industry created a hugely celebrated device that women thought sounded like a menstrual management product (the iPad), a female-dominated museum and library industry leads to a narrow set of preconceptions when it comes to program development and design. I've had plenty of meetings where we had to remind ourselves that we couldn't just create craft activities for women and no there would not be hearts on the walls in the Love exhibition. We consult community advisors on a regular basis to compensate for our gender diversity (and other) deficiencies and ensure that our programming is meaningful and non-exclusionary for men. It's a challenge on a daily basis to run an organization for our whole community when our staff represents half at most.

But, and here's where it gets tricky... how BIG a problem is this gender imbalance? When we talk about other kinds of diversity in the museum workforce--racial, ethnic, socioeconomic--it's clear that the problem is serious. Many museums and other arts organizations are seen as instruments of an elitist, white culture that systematically excludes people of color (e.g. this post). True diversity on staff leads to the exposure and deconstruction of discriminatory practices that prevent our organizations from feeling truly relevant and open to diverse community members.

It's not as clear to me that this same issue applies when talking about men, especially white men, who are not victims of systematic discrimination. When it comes to fields like engineering, the reason that people are so energized about increasing minority participation is twofold:

1. Many minorities (women and racial/ethnic minorities) receive constant harmful messages about their inadequacy when it comes to that may prevent them from pursuing passions in math and science. This is perceived by some as deeply unfair. It takes active intervention and investment to reverse this systematic discrimination and bias.
2. Engineering careers come with economic opportunity that can move people up socio-economically and advance national GDP/innovation. Engineering jobs can enable minority citizens to achieve more, thus balancing out some inequity and cultivating more overall wealth. 

Do these same arguments apply in fields like the non-profit arts? These jobs are low-paying, economically unstable, and highly competitive. They are not seen (unfortunately) as essential to generating significant personal or community wealth and value. And I don't know that there is a systematic gender bias preventing men from pursuing careers in arts or education. I've never heard of a man who was told that art might be too "hard" for him as my female college roommate was told about mechanical engineering. There may be a gender representation issue in museums, but is there an equity issue? I'm not sure.

I would really, really like to work with more men. I would love for them to be interested and to be represented. But I don't know where the point is at which men are feeling deterred from their interests in pursuing museum careers and what I can do about it. I don't know if I should worry about this.

Maybe it's OK to have some fields that are gender-imbalanced as long as minority voices have a role in program development and production. Maybe it's great that there's a field where women can take the lead. I'm proud that our institution went from having a male director and all-female staff to a female director and all-female staff--at least girlpower goes all the way to the top here. There are plenty of other content and media industries that don't have female domination--our power in museums could be a balancing salve in the bigger picture. We can and do create superb programming for our whole community, with the same implicit deficiencies of any organization that lacks diversity.

Or maybe it's terrible that men are slowly opting out of museum work. Maybe it means they will slowly opt out of cultural institutions altogether and perceive them as irrelevant to their lives. I know from talking to friends who work in ballet that it is indeed possible for a whole genre of art to be seen as "for women."

What do you think? Is the gender imbalance causing problems for arts workers, visitors, or society? How does it affect you? What should we do about it?

12 Ways We Made our Santa Cruz Collects Exhibition Participatory

In the spirit of a popular post written earlier this year, I want to share the behind the scenes on our current almost-museumwide exhibition at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, Santa Cruz Collects. This exhibition showcases collectors from throughout Santa Cruz County--people with collections from animal skulls to dryer lint to priceless historic flags. The content focuses on the question of WHY we collect and how our collections reflect our individual and community identities.

This exhibition represents a few big shifts for us:

• We used a more participatory design process. Our previous big exhibition, All You Need is Love, was highly participatory for visitors but minimally participatory in the development process. Santa Cruz Collects is based on collections and stories from people throughout our county. That meant months of tracking down leads for people with interesting collections and working with them to develop an approach to showcasing their objects that was cohesive while honoring the diversity of their experiences.
• We had some money. Instead of a total budget of $200 for participatory elements, we spent about $4,000 on materials for participatory elements in this exhibition. This shift was largely thanks to a grant from the James Irvine Foundation, which provided funding for a key  component--the Memory Jar installation. A million thanks to them.
• We focused more on design. While the Love exhibition was popular, it was our first attempt at full integration of interdisciplinary content on a big human idea, interactivity, and participation. The result was not as visually cohesive or attractive as it could have been. Coming off that experience, we wanted to prove that we could have great design AND great participation in this show. We worked with an incredible intern and staff team to push it to the next level, both by improving the overall visual aesthetic of the show and by focusing in on fewer, more developed interactive components. Santa Cruz Collects has garnered rave reviews visually from some of the same people who were dismayed by All You Need is Love. 
• We're involving visitor services and volunteers more intentionally in facilitation. This is the first time we've had an ongoing activity with a lot of materials (Memory Jars). There are Legos and fake flowers and fabric scraps and sand and a whole lot more. Rather than having our exhibit team walk through and fix things up every once in awhile, we wrote facilitation plans for the Memory Jars and other intensive participatory elements. Our visitor services team is responsible for managing, replacing, documenting, and in some cases, improving these elements now that they are live on the floor.

Without further ado, here's what we did to make the exhibition participatory. You can find several more photographs here. I hope there's something in here you can use. As always, I welcome your questions and comments. 

Process:

A sample exhibition label for one of the collections -
incredible toasters from 1906 to 1960.

• We collaborated with community members to source content and develop the show. This is an exhibition built from community members' stuff. We did a series of call-outs to find intriguing collectors. Sometimes, we'd hear something vague about a guy with great branding irons or a lady who showed wild stuff at the county fair. We tracked down as many people as we could and developed a big spreadsheet so we could evaluate the possibilities. We wanted diversity along several axes--stories, types and sizes and scales of collections, perception of value, age of collector, gender, and geographic home base of collector. We were fortunate to have an in-house team with varied attention; while I cared most about the stories behind the collecting, our art curator Susan fixated on aesthetics of the objects, and our history curator Marla focused on novelty, diversity of county representation, and whether people were calling us back. Because we wanted a really clean design and a personal feel, we interviewed all the collectors to capture their stories, creating labels that blended their first-person quotes with our curatorial commentary about the "why" behind their collecting. A stellar volunteer photographer, Tony Grant, took a portrait of each collector in his/her element. While some collectors had us select and design the displays of their objects, others collaborated with us to create their areas, adding their own unique quirks (like putting hats on computers to personalize them).
• We worked with volunteers and interns again to create soundscapes that focused on collecting. One volunteer captured stories at the flea market; another asked people on the street about the memories they would keep (to accompany the Memory Jars).
• We worked co-creatively with a group of anthropologists and archaeologists from UCSC to produce a small exhibition on the 3rd floor based on a pre-existing exhibition they had created about how they encounter and work with objects in their global research. We agreed to take the artifacts from their original show but worked with them to rewrite labels and shift the focus to be more personal and in-line with the Santa Cruz Collects big idea. This was a partnership that involved meaty dialogue to get to a shared success; it was important to the anthropologists that we not present fallacious images of them as "collectors" or antiquity hunters, and it was important to us to show the human side of why they work with particular objects. 
• We made a giant mobile for the center of the museum out of origami birds folded from visitor comments received in the past year. Our community programs staff worked with visitors to make the birds, vote on a final design, and hang the mobile over a series of evening events prior to opening.
• As in the past, we prototyped all interactive and participatory visitor experiences at museum events in the months leading up to the show. The prototypes were all simple, cheap, and extraordinarily valuable in shaping the final product. We have a rule that every prototype must be used to answer a specific question we can act on, whether that's an A/B comparison, figuring out what's confusing, etc.

First Floor

• 

  Exploring and making jars with the instructional
  mural in the background.

  Memory Jars installation. Our first floor Lezin Gallery is small--about 300 square feet. We like to use it as a participatory introduction to the exhibition, to front load the concept that you the visitor are invited to actively contribute to the exhibition at hand. This time, instead of offering lots of little experiences, we devoted the gallery to one experience: making Memory Jars. The idea is simple: floor to ceiling shelving holding mason jars, each of which holds a label that reads "I remember..." We put out donated craft materials and colored pencils and invite visitors to bottle up a memory to add to the collection. This activity was developed after several prototypes intended to explore the idea that some of our most precious collections are not physical at all. We tried collecting dreams, collecting smells or sounds or stories, but memories was most resonant. We decided (with the support of the James Irvine Foundation) to go big and devote the whole gallery to the activity, spending money to build shelves and buy matching jars. Since the activity is so simple to explain, we hired a local illustrator to create a giant mural to provide instructions in an IKEA dreamland style. We collect people's email addresses (opt in) on a clipboard if they want to come get their jar at the end of the show in late November. We've been overwhelmed by participation in the first month. We have 400 jars, of which about 300 are filled already. Some are funny, some are sweet, some are poignant, some are sad. We're going to need more jars. They might not match.
• Pocket Museums in bathrooms. We also brought back the pocket museums in the first floor bathrooms - see last week's post for more discussion of these and their mixed success.

Second Floor 

A visitor mid-vote at the Deaccessioning station:
are these objects worthy of our museum? 

The Solari Gallery is the heart of the exhibition, where the majority of the collections are on display. There are three participatory elements in this gallery:

• What Kind of Collector Are You? quiz. This is a teen magazine-style flowchart quiz that takes you through a series of simple scenarios and decisions to determine what type of collector you are (based on five major types as defined by psychologists). Participants vote by putting a button in the jar labeled with the type they turn out to be. We've found personality quizzes to be a very popular form of participation; in this case, the layout allows you to either do the quiz and then vote on your type or to vote directly just by reading the labels on the jars. This might be a defect or a good thing. I talked to one visitor who told me, "I knew I was a 'for others' type and then I went back and did the quiz to be sure." 
• Deaccessioning interactive. We stole this idea directly from the 2009 UCL Disposal? exhibition. We picked four objects from our collection with dubious connection to our collecting policy, explained the pros and cons of keeping each in short bullet-style labels, and let people vote on whether we should keep them or not. We were careful to phrase it as "pro/con" instead of "keep/dump" because we didn't want to promise to act based on visitors' votes. After much debate about how to make this feel different from the personality quiz (which also has a voting-style interaction), we decided to use tickers for votes--the same kind you use for counting people at events. People like clicking them, but they also monkey with the reset knobs on the side. Fortunately, anyone who changes the votes changes the pros and cons equally (the reset button only affects the thousands digit). But the voter fraud is worth it. The activity does get people looking really deeply at the objects and arguing with their friends about what we should keep, and we can see their preferences in the votes.
  
• Hoarders Anonymous. We didn't want to label any of the collectors in the exhibition as a hoarder, but we knew we wanted to deal with this topic. We created a simple table (made from a cracked vitrine filled with junk) with a hanging "Hoarders Anonymous" sign, an "Are You a Hoarder" quiz, a checklist to take shopping to help you keep from excessive hoarding, and a notebook where people can share their hoarding stories. And pencils. The only problem with this element is that the completed quizzes tend to pile up. They aren't fascinating or personal enough to take home, so they hang around. We thought about a different format for them or a way for people to add them to a "hoarded" pile, but we ultimately decided just to sweep through each day and recycle completed ones. While this table is in the middle of the gallery, people have very intense personal experiences writing in the notebook or doing the quizzes with friends. I credit the intern who developed this for a carefully honed sensitivity to both the seriousness and humor inherent in hoarding.

  
  

  
  

• Digital Collections comment wall. One of the special collections in the show is from Bruce Damer's Digibarn--an idiosyncratic personal museum of computer history. We wanted to create a talkback wall that dealt in some way with the fact that computers have become the repositories for many of our collections, and the increasing availability of cheap digital storage has made hoarders of us all. But most of the prompts we came up with--how do you curate your digital files? what are your most important digital collections?--generated boring responses. After internal prototyping, we came up with a prompt about the opposite of digital collecting--digital loss. The current prompt reads, "I deleted those files because..." and the setup is designed to resemble an old-school computer terminal. It has generated wonderful and diverse stories. 

3rd Floor Landing

Danny's artifacts in the middle,
flanked by visitor-generated lists.

• List Scrolls. One of our collectors, Danny Lazzarini, collects found lists. We decided to use her collection as the basis for a participatory project in which visitors would contribute to large lists we put on scrolls flanking Danny's. Again, it took a lot of prototyping to come up with prompts that were suitable evocative to generate interesting responses. Our final four are "Things that scare me," "Things we forget," "Things I can't let go of," and "The best feelings in the world." We have markers out for people to respond, and the lists fill up with diverse responses. We cycle in one fresh list every two weeks so there are always lists that are full to read and others that invite new participants. After big events, they can get packed, but that's kind of interesting too. There has been some sexual innuendo but nothing we deemed offensive so far.

Finally, it would feel completely strange to not give shout-outs to the staff and interns who made all of this possible. You may not care about the names of the individuals on our team, but they all deserve a million years of credit and goodwill. And the interns deserve rocking jobs. So thank you to interns Anna Greco, who led the Memory Jar and Deaccessioning development, Nora Grant, who created our Hoarding Anonymous chapter and helped with label writing, Rose Cannon, who developed the personality quiz and a little matching game (not described in this post) for the stairwell, Sara Radice, who made our labels absolutely gorgeous, and Megan Merritt, who made the perfect list scrolls. And of course, our killer exhibitions team, Susan Leask, Marla Novo, and most of all Robbie Schoen, who went above and beyond as preparator to make the most beautiful displays of electric drills and animal skulls that you will ever see. Many other people helped make this project happen, but this is the core team and I am incredibly honored to work with them.

And P.S. some of the interns are graduating and moving and we need more fabulous collaborators to heap creative challenges on. Come intern with us.

Gender Differences in Participation: The Pocket Museum Example

This morning, I checked in on the Pocket Museums on our museum's ground floor. This simple participatory project invites visitors to contribute their own small objects in little alcoves in our bathrooms. We piloted it last year as part of a "behind the scenes" event, and we brought back last month to coincide with a thematic exhibition on collecting and identity.

Here's the strange thing. I walked into the women's bathroom and saw what I expected to see--a bunch of quirky objects on display with stories written on post-its.

Then I walked into the men's bathroom. No objects. A couple stories. And a lot of screwing around.

After I took down all the "kick me" and "kick it" post-its covering the Pocket Museum title label in the men's room, I realized that this is the perfect example of an A-to-B test for gendered response to a participatory museum experience. The men's and women's bathroom got the same prompts and the same supplies in identical spaces. But people have participated in completely different ways.

I'm not drawing any major conclusions from this, but it was incredibly interesting--especially since the behavior in the men's bathroom deviated sharply from the range of participatory response we see throughout the rest of the museum. We have seven participatory elements in our current exhibitions on three floors, ranging from voting to talkback walls to an in-depth "make a memory jar" craft activity. The participation is almost 100% on-topic and appropriate. We don't see much screwing around here. People like participating, we take them seriously, and they take us seriously.

But not so much in the men's bathroom. Here are three possible explanations for this gender divide:

• Men and women use bathrooms differently. A women's bathroom has a slight social function, whereas a men's bathroom does not. Given the chance in a more private, male-only space, men might be more likely than women to mess around. 
• The Pocket Museum activity could be more appropriate for women, many of whom carry bags or purses. If the activity is not as relevant to men, they might use the tools provided to do something else.
• Maybe women are the lead participants throughout the museum, and they create a normative set of seed content that encourages men to behave comparably in exhibits (but not in bathrooms). I would be surprised if this is the case given my direct observation of visitors in the galleries; however, the Dallas Museum of Art's Ignite the Power of Art study DID show a much higher incidence of participation among women at that museum (62% vs 38% for men, more information here). 

I'm sure you have many other ideas about why this might be happening... and I hope you share them in the comments. What I think is interesting is that this is noticeable at all. It makes me curious about what other techniques we could use to test differences in participatory response. In general, we try to encourage multi-vocal participation, deliberately ensuring that the seed content represents diverse approaches to the activity or exhibition. We want a broad range of people to feel that there is a place "for them" in the exhibition and to feel connected to diverse participants through the activity. 

This bridging effect is really important to us. The last thing we want is to become the kind of place where one demographic group participates while another stands back and watches (a problem common to science and children's museums when it comes to kids and adults). Maybe A-to-B testing can help identify some of the subtle differences among our visitors and improve our approach so that we keep making sure that our invitation to participate rings true for our diverse community.

And in the meantime, we'll try to get some better seed content in the men's room... or maybe we need a different activity in there. This may be the first time I advocate for gender-segregated exhibit design. What would you do?

The Public Argument About Arts Support as Seen through the Lens of the Detroit Institute of Arts

Earlier this month, the Detroit Institute of Arts was "saved" by a voter-approved property tax (called a "millage") in its three surrounding counties. The millage will provide about $23M per year for ten years to support operations, during which time the DIA hopes to raise $400M to enhance its endowment and replace the operating income from the millage. Residents in the three counties that pay the millage will receive special benefits: free admission to the museum and expanded educational programming.

I'm not going to comment on the reasons for the millage or its merits from an arts management perspective--please check out Diane Ragsdale's excellent post for a round-up of commentary and some hard-hitting opinions about the big picture. I'm focusing on the community response to the prospect of the millage and the way the public debate reflects broader conversations about the public value of the arts.

Analyzing Public Comments in the Detroit Free Press Online

The pre-vote public commentary in the Detroit Free Press about the millage is like any online newspaper commentary: polarizing, extreme, and highly varied in tone and reasonableness. But the arguments trotted out represent how far we have to go in articulating the public value of arts institutions (and helping our supporters speak the same language). It's like a giant, free, no-holds-barred focus group that represents a true range of arts users and non-users.

Reading through the 300+ comments online reminded me eerily of the extraordinary 2010 ArtsWave report on the public value of art (full report here, my synopsis here). The report, which focused on Cincinnati, found that the common arguments for public support for the arts don't hold up for most people. In the executive summary, the authors identified several common assumptions that "work against the objective of positioning the arts as a public good." Here are three of those assumptions and their substantiation in the Detroit Free Press:

• The arts are a private matter: Arts are about individual tastes, experiences and enrichment, and individual expression by artists. 

• This perspective was rampant in Michigan. As one Detroit Free Press commenter wrote: "You are not getting it. Your cultural outlet is art galleries and symphonies. Mine is tractor pulls, MMA and the occasional anvil shoot. But why is yours more deserving of my tax dollars?"  

• The arts are a good to be purchased: Therefore, most assume that the arts should succeed or fail, as any product does in the marketplace, based on what people want to purchase. 

• Several Detroit comments were in this vein. Commenters asked reasonable questions about why the museum couldn't balance the books, but more importantly, they kept coming back to the argument that if the museum was successful, it would be financially viable. One commenter told a DIA supporter: "[if you support them] just send the DIA a $20 check. Why force everyone else to do it? If all the people that plan to vote yes just bought a membership to the DIA, there would be no need for the property tax. Vote with your money instead."

• The arts are a low priority: Even when people value art, it is rarely high on their list of priorities.  

• Detroit, like a lot of cities, is struggling financially on many levels. Many comments on the DIA fell in this category, e.g. "I would rather my $20 goes to my local schools, police, or fire if they are going to raise my tax." Many of the comments also suggested that it was unfair for people throughout the counties to support an institution in the middle of the city.

Community Case Statements for the Public Value of Art

So what do we do with these assumptions? The ArtsWave report suggests that we need to make effective, specific case statements for public support of the arts. Several commenters in the Detroit Free Press in support of the millage tried their best. Their arguments ranged in success, mirroring the discussion in the ArtsWave report about the utility and shortcomings of common case statements (see page 15 of the report). Here are just two arguments that were notable for the difference in the responses they sparked:

• Unsuccessful argument: Great cities should have great arts institutions. As one commenter said: "it's so embarrassing to come back home and find that people in this area don't care for the gems we still have, just no sense of pride here."
• Rebuttal: That's elitist. Lots of negative and ambivalent reaction to this case statement. This kind of comment was common: "Your elitist tone is what turns people off from wanting to pay higher taxes. The whole 'we know how to spend your money better than you' attitude is condescending and false."
• Successful argument: Great museums improve quality of life and the value of the region. "it’s just not about a museum, it’s a local AND regional “quality of life” issue. Whether it’s visitors from the suburbs or from out of town, or possible families contemplating relocation, or the city residents themselves…people look at the Entire Big Picture….Education, Culture (Symphony, Opera, Museum), Sporting venues, Shopping, Crime & Safety, etc."
• Rebuttal: none. Interestingly, these kinds of comments on the website did not spawn heavy critique or vitriol. This was also the argument put forth in news articles by politicians--that cultural amenities, schools, and neighborhoods are all important when courting businesses or prospective homeowners.

This second argument is one part of the case statement that ArtsWave recommended for the city of Cincinnati. Their recommended case statement is:

A thriving arts sector creates “ripple effects” of benefits throughout our community. 

They elaborate that:

The following two ripple effects are especially helpful and compelling to enumerate:

• A vibrant, thriving economy: Neighborhoods are more lively, communities are revitalized, tourists and residents are attracted to the area, etc. Note that this goes well beyond the usual dollars-and-cents argument. 
• A more connected population: Diverse groups share common experiences, hear new perspectives, understand each other better, etc.

Looking at news articles and public discussion, it seems that the DIA's supporters won the day with the first of these arguments. I hunted through the Detroit Free Press discussion with the second ripple effect in mind, but I couldn't find evidence of it in the comments. I found some comments about the fact that the DIA provides programs for schoolchildren and poor families, but that falls into the "services" case statement that often yields unfavorable comparison to "core" civic services (schools, police, social services). I found only one comment about the diversity of visitors to the DIA, but that was presented in rebuttal to someone saying it is an elitist organization. There were no case statements for the DIA that emphasized how the museum brings us all together, connects counties, or creates bridges.

Opportunities for the Future (and for Other Struggling Arts Institutions)

This issue and the discussion surrounding it highlighted to me the value of the ArtsWave report as a proactive tool for advocacy. No one wants to wait for a life-or-death situation to start testing out case statements. If I were running the DIA, I would have used the ArtsWave report to map out talking points during the millage debate. And as the director of an organization rebounding from financial crisis, I'm thinking a lot about what messages support our future and how to encourage not just staff but our members and friends to think about the museums in those terms. Every time a visitor talks about enjoying the museum, I smile. But when they use phrases like "making the community a better place" or "part of something bigger," I'm thrilled.

And what to do when the advocacy is successful, as in the case of Detroit? I'm surprised by the little the DIA has said publicly about the millage effort and its outcome. I understand that the museum was restricted in public statements during the campaign, but afterwards, I expected a much more aggressive reframing. In thanking people for supporting the millage, the DIA focuses on granting benefits (primarily free admission) and makes almost no commentary about what these taxpayers have done and are doing for the future of the DIA and the vitality of the Detroit metro area. I can understand why regular citizens (or irregular, depending on what you think of people who comment on newspaper sites) might not focus on social case statements for the DIA. But the institution should jump on that. There's a missed opportunity to reframe what the millage means and the role of community support in museum funding when saying thank you.

It's probably a useful exercise for any institution to ask: what are the messages about our value that resonate most--not just with our own supporters, but with the people in our community who don't know anything about us? If people were debating the future of our institution in the paper, what would they say? How can we equip our supporters with the strongest case statements so they can be champions and not pariahs? And how do we engrain those arguments into our operations so they are self-evident?

Participatory Internships in Santa Cruz this School Year

It's the end of the summer, which means we are sadly bidding farewell to our fabulous summer interns, getting lonely and scared about how we will possibly do amazing work in the coming months without their brilliance, ingenuity, and creativity.

And then comes the part where we recruit new interns, get blown away by their abilities... and the cycle continues. At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, we take our interns seriously, give them real responsibility, creative challenges, and meaningful work opportunities. We ask a lot and we give a lot and at the end of the day we sometimes throw parachute men off the roof.

I'm particularly excited about two internships that relate to participatory exhibition design. We also have fabulous opportunities in Community Programs, Education, and Development - please check the website for all the options and information on how to apply. You don't have to be a student to be eligible. Our interns include undergraduates, graduate students, and people of all ages looking to jumpstart creative careers in community engagement.

First, there is the Participatory Exhibit Design Internship. These interns work with our curatorial team to develop interactive and participatory components for upcoming exhibitions. Current and former interns have developed everything from games to personality tests to a whole-gallery installation of memory jars. We typically have two to three interns in this role, working 15 to 24 hours per week. Interns this year will be focusing on our winter Work in Progress show (Thomas Campbell, Ze Frank, Timber Framing) and spring Photography and Identity show. We are always looking for interns with strong graphic/3D design skills; the best interns can help us plan exhibits, design labels, AND learn to develop terrific participatory experiences for visitors.

Second, and highly experimental, is the Museum Camp Internship. We have recently decided that in the summer of 2013, we will be hosting a 3-day professional development hack-a-thon in which participants will develop, design, and deploy innovative interpretative experiences around collection objects. It will tie into an experimental, month-long exhibition in our main gallery. In other words, people who participate in Museum Camp will get to test all kinds of wild ideas for visitor engagement with a real live exhibition. We already have enthusiastic support from some museum rock stars like Kathleen McLean, Maria Mortati, and Eric Siegel. Exciting, right? To make this a hit, we're going to need someone who wants to make this their baby and support its creation. So if you want to help develop an unconference and explore participatory exhibit design, this internship is right for you. (And of course, much more to come about Museum Camp in the months to come.)

Fine print: all internships at the MAH are unpaid. We are happy to help you get school credit for your work here, and we love writing glowing recommendations for your future careers. Our interns tend to be highly self-motivated people who have always dreamed of having the latitude to make their dreams real. People who struggle tend to need more structure and direction than our institutional culture affords. Please feel free to comment or email with any questions.

What's the String that Ties One Experience at Your Institution with the Next?

Reader, I was wrong.

In 2008, I wrote a post arguing that museums should focus on the pre-visit, not the post-visit, if they want to capture and retain visitors. I said:

In many ways, the ability to successfully set a powerful and useful expectation for museum experiences is MORE valuable than the ability to extend said experience. When you set an expectation, you frame an experience. Once visitors have already banged on the exhibits and watched the giant nostril show, the experience belongs totally to them. The chances of reaching and holding onto them back at home are small. They’ve formed their impressions of the on-site experience, and their chance of returning, becoming members, etc. is heavily based on those impressions. You can send them all the pleasant follow-up emails you like, but such notes are unlikely to be the motivating factor that brings them back through your doors.

While I still believe that framing the experience with marketing and at the beginning of a visit is important, a workshop last week taught me that the end of the visit is potentially very, very important when it comes to encouraging deeper involvement with the museum. I now realize that people can have a great experience and have NO CLUE what other opportunities (return visit, membership, in-depth programs) are available to them. I don't care how many platforms you're active in--if they are not connected to each other, people will not aggregate the experiences.

What's missing for these visitors who attend, enjoy, and don't (or sporadically) return? They are missing a string.

Let me explain. For a long time, I've thought of museum visits or cultural encounters as pearls on a string. Each experience is a pearl. They are not necessarily linear or identical to each other. But if you want to deepen the commitment between visitor and institution over time, you need a string that visitors can hang their pearls on, a thread that holds the growing relationship together. No string, and you've just got a bunch of visits rolling under the furniture.

Yes, pre-visit marketing, announcements, and welcomes are essential to get that first pearl in a visitor's hand. But we all know that it's easier to keep a current user/visitor/patron than to acquire a new one. How do you build your relationship with that person who has gotten their first pearl? How do you give them the string?

Last week, as the kickoff for the Loyalty Lab project, the experience design firm Adaptive Path facilitated a workshop at my museum for staff and visitors in which we created a "map" of the visitor experience at a museum event. Our goal was to wholly understand how visitors experience our events before, during, and after the visit.

One of the surprises was a series of observations from casual visitors--people who attend an event or two per year, who are not members, and who tend to come because of word of mouth or an invitation from a friend. They all reported having a great time at the museum... and immediately letting go of it afterwards. There was no followup. They had not been asked to join an email list or take a newsletter or join the museum. They had not taken photos in our photo booth and gotten an email about them later. They were not part of our Facebook community sharing photos and stories from the event. They came, they made a pearl, and then they dropped in their pocket with the rest of their day.

We realized from this discussion that we have a huge missed opportunity when people are leaving the museum. On their way in, they are excited, curious, ready to engage. They are not ready to hear about membership or take a newsletter about what's coming up next time. They bolt right past those tables to the "good stuff." But at the end, they've had a great time, and they want a takeaway from the experience. They WANT to join the email list. If we're smart, we should be developing a takeaway that both memorializes the visit and leads them to another. In other words, we should be giving them a string for their new pearl.

As a concrete example, consider the library. The pearls are the books you read. But the string is the library card. I've always thought of the library card as the first thing you get at the library, but it actually comes at the end of the first visit, when you have loaded up with books and you want to take them home. The card is a passport to continue your experience with the books and with the library. You want the card because it's your ticket to proceed. But it also becomes the connector that ties one experience to the next.

At our institution, we have several string candidates. Visitors make a lot of stuff here, and we're talking about ways they might be able to exhibit or share it with others in a way that encourages their return to see how their stuff has evolved. We're considering expanding our photo booth survey machine. We're talking about punch cards that serve as cultural passports with a range of museum-related missions or lead you to "earn" a membership. Or, there's just the simple starting point--a newsletter, a membership brochure, a friendly volunteer inviting you back. We're talking about shifting from having "greeters" to having "goodbyers" who thank you for coming and invite you to a next specific event.

What's the string in your organization? How do you invite people back, and how do you help them collect and aggregate their experiences with you in a meaningful way?

Introducing Loyalty Lab

A woman walks into your museum. She's visited a few times before, and you vaguely recognize her as the lady who loved bubble painting, thought the bike sculpture was funny and didn't like the video installation. Last time she had a kid with her, and he got chalk all over his hands from the mosaic activity they did with a volunteer. They wrote a comment about their experience that got turned into a bird by other visitors in the public sculpture hanging in the middle of the museum. You remember seeing them stand in front of the magic mirror in the history gallery, laughing as they made themselves into giants in the glass.

In the admission log today, she is registered as a tick mark under the column marked "General." That's it. No information about who she is, why she's here, what she's looking for, and what she gets out of her connection to the museum. No memory of her relationship with us.

Our museum has a big challenge when it comes to tracking and rewarding participation. Like a lot of small museums, at the MAH staff and community members build relationships on a daily basis. Staff members invite visitors to help write exhibit labels, create art installations, and give opinions on upcoming programs. Visitors become volunteers and take the lead on new projects and activities. Visitors tell staff members and volunteers again and again how their lives are changing because of their involvement with the museum.

This is wonderful and maddening at the same time. It is wonderful to see the uptick in membership and donations and the positive energy from people who come in the door. It is maddening to have no way to track or intentionally encourage these relationships to grow. Like many small museums, the MAH cannot afford expensive ticketing or membership software systems. We have email newsletters and memberships and conversations, but none of those things talk to each other. Our computers are amnesiacs when it comes to participation. We have very high ability to form relationships with visitors, but very low ability to capitalize on those interactions.

With the support of the National Arts Strategies Chief Executive Program and the Institute for Museum and Library Services, we're starting a new project called Loyalty Lab to change that. In the Loyalty Lab, we will develop a series of low-tech, low-cost strategies and systems for small institutions to track, celebrate, and act on personal interactions with visitors. I'm not talking about RFID chips for every visitor or a Nike+ system to track their every move. I'm talking about human-scale, simple, delightful ways to acknowledge people's involvement and encourage them to go deeper. It could be loyalty cards. It could be charm bracelets. It could be free hugs. We want to be as creative as possible in exploring the options.

Our goals are to:

• Measure and increase membership acquisition and renewal 
• Measure and encourage repeat visitation 
• Increase participant perception of the MAH as a friendly place with high community value

And we want to do it with you, too. We've created a little blog that we will use to track our project openly. It's starting with a workshop tomorrow with Adaptive Path, an experience design firm that focuses on mapping "customer journeys" and developing tools that enable users to more enjoyably and successfully navigate the offerings of the business or organization. In museum terms, that means understanding how visitors hear about us, why they come, what they do when they are here, and what happens after they leave. It means finding the points along the way where we lose people, and the opportunities for us to track and celebrate people's deepening involvement. You can learn more about this process from an Adaptive Path slideshow here.

This is a year-long project for us at the MAH. We'll go from research to prototyping to final design from now until early summer of 2013. We'd love to have you join us as contributors to the Loyalty Lab blog or just follow along and comment on our progress. We've already heard from one museum--the Boston Children's Museum--where they are experimenting with a "V.I.F." program (Very Important Family) to reward repeat family engagement. I know there are other organizations--museums and beyond--playing with innovative approaches to membership, pricing, and tracking to support and encourage deeper relationships. The goal here is for all of us to learn and experiment together.

How do you think about loyalty and relationship-building in your organization?

Populism, Commercialism, and Jeffrey Deitch: The Shifting Debate about LA MOCA

Last week, my mom called. "That contemporary art museum is on the front of the LA Times again," she said. "It's more about that curator who was fired. I can't believe that an art museum can be front page news in LA for days."

LA MOCA has indeed been front page news, especially in the art world. I'm not usually that interested in museum politics, but this soap opera is too big to ignore, especially as the conversation has shifted over the last few weeks to something I care a lot about: populism.

Here's what happened:

• In 2010, amidst severe financial woes and declining audiences, the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA (MOCA), hired Jeffrey Deitch, a NYC gallery owner, to be their new director. He was mandated to turn the ship around financially and to expand the reach of the museum in the community. His success has been mixed on these accounts; attendance more than doubled in the past two years, and the budget has been righted at a much lower level than previously attained, but the financial health of the organization is in doubt and very, very dependent on mega-trustee Eli Broad.
• At the end of June of this year, Paul Schimmel, the MOCA's longstanding, well-respected chief curator, was fired. Strangely, Paul Schimmel was fired by the board, with the message delivered by Eli Broad, instead of by Deitch. The first wave of critique focused on the very valid question of why Schimmel was fired in this manner. 
• The discussion then shifted to the overall direction of the museum. Schimmel's departure was seen as the final confirmation of Deitch and Broad's populist, celebrity-driven approach to exhibitions, and that concerned many critics, artists, and museum directors in the art world. Schimmel's departure was followed by the resignation of the four high-profile artists on the MOCA board and a huge amount of debate in the press, including prominent people calling for Deitch to resign. 

In some ways, this debate is fabulous. It's amazing to see papers like the LA Times cover the debate about the future of an art museum deeply. It's wild to see so many bloggers and museum directors and critics weigh in. It's great when my mom wants to talk about it.

But it's also frustrating because I see a lot of conflation of different issues in the discussion of whether MOCA is going in the right direction. I'm pissed off that this debate is giving populism a bad name.

There are three distinct aspects to Jeffrey Deitch's approach that I believe need to be treated separately:

1. Commercialism. Deitch comes from the gallery world. Since he was hired, there have been concerns that Deitch would take MOCA in a direction that focuses on the darlings of the international art market based on dollar signs instead of artistic quality. Deitch has done this to some extent, and he has also pursued commercialism in another way: by engaging celebrities from the worlds of film and fashion as guest curators and artists. I agree that it is disturbing for a museum whose mission is "to be the defining museum of contemporary art" to invite amateur movie stars to curate exhibitions. Two of the artists who resigned from MOCA board expressed their concern in these terms, saying: "It's about the role of museums in a culture where visual art is marginalized except for the buzz around secondary market sales, it's about the not so subtle recalibration of the meaning of “philanthropy,” and it's about the morphing of the so-called “art world” into the only speculative bubble still left floating (for the next 20 minutes)."
2. Museum management. Is it appropriate for a museum director of a large, iconic institution to serve as its chief curator? Is it appropriate for a life-time non-voting museum trustee to fire an employee? Is it useful to have a director who can bring in crowds but can't raise necessary funds?  Is it good value to pay a museum director $650,000 per year? These are reasonable questions.
3. Populism. Deitch--and to an even greater degree, Eli Broad--have expressed clearly that they want to expand the audience at MOCA. Attendance has increased in the past two years from 150,000 to 400,000 annually. The question is whether this attendance gain is partnered by a loss for the institution--a loss of artistic or intellectual rigor, a loss of pursuit of excellence. Critics have rightly noted that admissions barely make a dent in an art museum's operation, so these additional people aren't adding much revenue to the museum. The implication, as in this complicated editorial by Boston ICA director Jill Medvedow, is that Deitch's combination of youth culture-dominated exhibitions, performances, stars and celebrities have "delivered audience" at a cost to education, scholarship, and long-term value.

I agree with the serious concerns in #1 and #2. But I am confused and frustrated about #3.

Visitors are people. They are not numbers. They are not dollars. They are not deliveries. They are people who have experiences with art in art museums. I'm dismayed that the same critics who decry Deitch's disregard for artists and curators treat the public as an unimportant commodity in museums. Why do these critics care so much about the influence of money and so little about the influence of audiences? Why do they focus on what bait is presented to lure visitors in and not on what opportunities are made to engage them?

I feel very strongly that a "defining museum of contemporary art" in one of the biggest cities in America should attract more than 150,000 visitors annually. It should probably attract more than 400,000 visitors annually. The numbers are signposts that demonstrate the extent to which diverse people in a community engage with the objects, stories, experiences, and learning that comes with a museum visit. And if contemporary art experiences are really going to be a significant part of daily life in a big city, the museum has to have a presence worth talking about, arguing about, and visiting. Consider the MCA Denver, which has become a national media darling for director Adam Lerner's eagerness to take on an ambitious goal of engaging a whole community with contemporary art.

What galls me most about this MOCA debate is the insinuation that there's a causal relationship between populism and quality. Attendance has a causal relationship with public awareness, access, and appeal, not with content type or artistic rigor. No one says that the Met is intellectually sloppy because millions of people visit each year. No one says a tiny regional museum is extraordinary or intellectually strong because only 5,000 people attend. There is no causal relationship there. Unfortunately, some museums, especially university museums, seem to believe in this causal relationship and trumpet the extent to which no one sees their shows as a sign of purity. This is the worst kind of elitism in museums. Whatever his missteps, Eli Broad is a strong voice in this regard. He describes increasing access to art as a "moral" issue for museums. I agree.

MOCA's mission talks about "engag[ing] artists and audiences through an ambitious program of exhibitions, collections, education, and publication." They may not be doing it in the right way. They may be overly influenced by a rich philanthropist with a very demanding personality. They may not have the right fundraising strategy. They may not have the right director. But hopefully they--and all art museums--will push forward in engaging artists AND audiences.

What do you think?

Ancient Greece 2.0: Arts Participation before the Industrial Age

When we talk about making museums or performing arts organizations more participatory and dynamic, those changes are often seen as threatening to the traditional arts experience. Audience commentary, comfortable spaces for eating and talking, opportunities for amateurs to contribute to professional work: these are often considered intrusions into formal, classical settings for enjoyment of arts.

But what if the "traditional" arts experiences is a myth? What if historic arts experiences were actually a lot more participatory? This week, I read a fabulous essay that made me feel a new kinship with the past in the quest to advocate for active audience engagement.

In In and Out of the Dark [pdf], Colby College professor Lynne Conner argues convincingly that the current refinement of the Western fine arts experience is an aberrant blip in a long history of participatory audience engagement. From the Ancient Greeks through the 1800s, audiences were rowdy, engaged people. They had the freedom--and in some cases, the obligation--to make their own meaning and share their interpretations of art with each other in structured and informal ways. They voted on the best plays in the days of Sophocles, stormed the symphony halls when confronted with artistic dischord, and talked and wrote about what they saw and what they thought. If arts managers fear bloggers today, imagine how they would have felt back in the good old days when the audience was yelling and throwing things at the stage.

Conner posits that it was only in the last hundred years that the passive audience was "constructed" via a confluence of cultural, economic, and technological changes. From Conner's perspective, this construction has led us to a bifurcated cultural landscape, in which people seek out active audience experiences outside of the fine arts structure because the passive audience experience is not as satisfying or enjoyable as the alternatives. Conner argues that open mics, poetry slams, even professional sports events, are thriving because they offer audiences diverse opportunities to co-author meaning as participants, not just consumers.

What exactly constructed the passive arts audience? The big cultural shift came in the increasing distinction between highbrow and lowbrow art, which Conner describes as "the result of a deliberate effort to create a cultural hierarchy in America." The arts were sacralized and professionalized in their funding and presentation. Museums no longer showed human horns alongside historic documents; theaters made differentiations among types of live entertainment. Arts institutions began publishing instructive placards and documents to train audiences to behave more formally and to treat artists and artworks with silent respect. Proper audiences were like docile children, seen and not heard.

Conner is a theater person, and the technical changes she documents in theater that accelerated the quieting of audiences are fascinating to me as a novice in that world. Seats which once were moveable became fixed. Advances in electrical lighting allowed theaters to put actors in light and audiences in darkness. What was once a democratic forum became increasingly defined by the dividing line of the stage. As Conner puts it:

Eventually the combination of environmental forces (i.e., the dark auditorium and mandated etiquette) and the growing gap between the societal position of the artist and the arts patron effectively quieted the audience. By the early twentieth century people of all social classes were expected to treat arts events as private experiences. They were to sit still, to refrain from talking, and to keep their opinions to themselves. In the process opportunities for public discourse about the arts and the attendant opportunity for formulating and exchanging sets of opinions about the arts event itself were, for the most part, lost.

This perspective--that audiences were "silenced" during the past 100 years--creates a new kind of arsenal for those who support democratization and increased audience participation in the arts. We are honoring the deep history of serious arts engagement by pursuing participatory approaches. You could even argue that the "activist" conservatism of the past hundred years has done disturbing damage to the sharing, experiencing, and support of art in the U.S. In a time of intense socio-economic division, the concept of cultural hierarchy smacks of elitism. Arts organizations are seen as part of the 1% instead of forums to bring together 100%. Perhaps it's time to turn back the clock a little further when we talk about the good old days.


P.S. Lynne Conner has a book coming out next year called We the Audience. I can't wait. And thank you to Lauren Shultz, who introduced me to this article in a recent Museum 2.0 comment thread.